Hillary Clinton, Do Not Feel Guilty About Your Pleasures

Hillary Clinton talked to the Times about her favorite books: some of the many names mentioned include Laura Hillenbrand, Toni Morrison, John Grisham, Pablo Neruda, George W. Bush and the Bible, which she says “was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking.” In the interest of resisting the game of How Much Is This Q&A a Fake-Casual ‘Hey’ Text For America’s Smart Conservative Moms, let me just draw your attention to this one part:

What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre?

Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.

In an alternate universe she answered, “Listen, I don’t feel guilty about shit, but as a person with an incredibly high-stress job I often find it nice to read books about how to have a prettier life, in which there’s no theory or narrative, and the take-aways are always neat — and although people sometimes try to make me feel guilty about reading these books because they’re in a feminized sphere, I refuse because I’m Hillary Fucking Clinton.”

But this universe she has to be “relatable.” Maybe when she’s president we’ll just start a White House petition to abolish the idea of women self-labeling as guilty for any action that is not explicitly morally incorrect. Change we can believe i- faints from exhaustion. [NYTimes]